Misplaced Trust
by Pilar
Summary: A Post-Episodic Musing on "The Balance". From Michael's POV


_Disclaimer:_ The entire sentiment behind this comes directly from the show, so as usual, I own nothing but my own words.

_Rating:_ PG-13, for language.

_Feedback:_[ Let me know what you think.][1] Please, please, please...

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Misplaced Trust  
_A Post-episodic Musing on **"The Balance"**_  
by Pilar

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Maybe I'm not as fucked up as I think I am. Maybe each of us has a completely unique something that we add to each other and without one of us, nothing can work. Maybe it's about completion, but I don't really know what that means. Maybe it's not that I can't control my powers or that they're not honed to where they need to be, but instead it's that I bring something entirely different to the mix and that's enough. Maybe I'm up my ass.

I saw so much tonight, things are seemingly getting clearer and I feel better. As I lie here in my bed, I feel more grounded than I have ever felt. Even my bed seems a better place than it was last night, or the night before. None of this shit means anything. It's just a bed. Now, it's just the sorting out that needs to happen, the adding up and evaluating to figure out where we are in terms of where we should be.

I don't know where to begin since there's no end in sight and we don't know the beginning. Or rather, what we do know of the beginning is hazy and partial and disjointed and slept through. Maybe I should suss this out in my own terms, according to today, and forget the rest for the moment.

The middle; I almost died tonight. The beginning, well of this one thing, this minute element; I caused it myself but I would do it again if I knew that it would lead me to the same conclusion. The end; I have no idea what the end is or what any of it means in the grand scheme of things but, I don't know. It's clearer now than it ever was. I've learned so much. I had learned so little up to now.

I've seen home. I almost know where it is and it's so damn close that I can feel its winds brush my skin and smell its life. And I need it, but maybe I'm learning that I can wait. Not forever, but I can wait. I just have to trust that we'll get there eventually.

Trust. That's really what all of this is about. That's really the beginning. My beginning, at least. Trust. It's been the hardest thing for me to give and the one thing that I most need. My sole motivator. There have been only two people in my life that I've ever been able to trust, given my entire trust to, and the slightest betrayal is devastating. I realize that I'm asking a lot, but it takes that much. It's that important.

Sometimes, I used to believe that maybe I was the only one that I could put my complete trust in. It's so selfish, this concept of trust, that, because you can't slip into everyone's minds and know precisely what their motivations are or know what they're thinking, you form your own ideas on what it is that goes through there. And this is what you're forced to put your trust in, if you choose. Most of the time, I did not choose. I knew in my heart that if I was the only one that I really, honestly trusted, what I was really doing was rationalizing blame. It allowed me to place the blame on others, for what I'd essentially done to myself. I put myself in the direct line of everything that's ever happened to me and sometimes, it's nice to relax in the rationalization that it was someone else's fault. Y'know? Like, he did nothing to make me trust him and now I'm here, so it must be his fault. Comforting, huh? Yeah...

So this trust thing, it being so important to me and all, well... it makes me do things. I feel like I'm so teetering on the brink that I need the whole story, from every considerable angle, before I can even trust the story itself. Or, as in most cases, the person attached to it at that infinite second. I'll let that explain my general reaction.

When I saw that sheet of symbols slip from Max's notebook and realized that he had been keeping something so important from me, something so intrinsic to our entire everything, I felt like he'd taken a chunk of my blind trust in him and crushed it with a stone under his own hands. Max didn't trust me, and if he didn't trust me as strongly as I've trusted him, then what the fuck was I doing trusting him at all?

So, I tweaked. I'm not trying to make excuses for myself, I'm simply stating a fact that might begin to explain things. Explain why, in the beginning of this, yes, I fucked up, but it's all about the end, of this, that's important. So maybe I don't need excusal for the beginning. At least from my narrow point of view, from that place where I stand. Yesterday, I might have blamed Max for everything that followed the betrayal of my trust, but now I realize that only I have that power. Only I have the power to determine my actions and I have to accept and deal with the consequences of those actions.

I almost died tonight, and in the end it was my fault. Not Max's, even though what he did was wrong, and even though his lack of trust in me still hurts. It's a two way street, to use some cliched line. He should have trusted us, Isabel and I, with the information he held so close to him, but I should have trusted that his reasons for keeping it from us, from me mainly, were good. Maybe I haven't given him reason to trust me and I expect him to do it completely, and more blindly that I have myself. And why should he? I wouldn't, and I never did, and that's gotten me where? I'm not going to even mention the foster homes and trailer parks and Hank Guerin. My fault. Such are the end results of my issues with trust.

So if trust is my sole motivator, maybe it's not so sole. Fear, that's the other one, but I don't really want to go there just yet. That's a whole 'nother story, and one I'm not really ready to face. I'm going to simply recognize it's existence and move on. Clearly it's there, hidden under the surface, pushing me along, but I can think about that later. Another time, maybe.

Then I was near death and in another place, my entire life hanging by the tender thread of other people. The realization that I needed to put my trust, my life, in their hands, it came slowly. I saw them there though, reaching to pull me back, and I touched them. They touched me. They brought me back, and only because I trusted them enough to come back.

And I've stopped running. I've stopped running from them, from myself, from the little that I have that's so much. And I'm learning, slowly, to trust.

THE END

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   [1]: mailto:pilar@chickmail.com



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